Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

I love the liberal elite, except when they talk

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I'm accused of bringing too much emotion and not enough intellect to my linguistic analysis.

If anything, I think I'm not emotional enough.

I'm not a professional linguist; I only care about language to the extent that it pleases me, or pisses me off. It pisses me off when it's pretentious, or inherently dishonest.

Watching this Diane Sawyer interview with the Facebook geek Zuckerman, I ran across an example of usage that pissed me off mightily. Watch the video, and see how he repeatedly uses the quickly-uttered word "right" in what's either a totally presumptuous or an utterly manipulative way.

This usage—and I see it out of the young smart alecks from Silicon Valley to MSNBC—puts forth a coercive assumption that whatever the speaker is saying must be "right."

Right?

This is right up there with people—the same well-educated young-ish people, usually—who say "sort of" way too fucking much: At some level, I sort of felt a kind of enui.

Hey kids. You know how you sometimes watch FOX to see what the morons are talking about, and then Sean Hannity opens his mouth for four seconds and says something so jerky that you switch the channel real fast because you don't need more anger in your life?

Well what do you think the clodhoppers do when they click over to MSNBC and in the first minute, hear Rachel Maddow and her guests starting answers to questions with the word "so," saying "right" at the wrong time and using "sort of" three times in a sentence?

Think like an Ivy Leaguer; talk like a regular human being.

The beauty of 9/11

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Working out just now in front of MSNBC's real-time replay of NBC's live coverage on Sept. 11, 2001, I kept fighting off this inappropriate feeling of longing.

As the white-gray smoke drifted across the blue sky off the south tip of Manhattan that morning, Americans may not have known what was going wrong exactly or what was needed—remember, people sent millions of dollars to the Red Cross, which didn't know what to do with it?—but we all agreed that there was a problem and that it was urgent.

People often allow nostalgia to creep into their voice when they remember the JFK funeral, and even Pearl Harbor.

It was terrible; but we were going through it together, and we remember that sense of comfort, too.